Before Miss Haldin had ceased speaking I felt the grip of his hand on mine, a muscular, firm grip, but unexpectedly hot and dry.  Not a word or even a mutter assisted this short and arid handshake.

I intended to leave them to themselves, but Miss Haldin touched me lightly on the forearm with a significant contact, conveying a distinct wish.  Let him smile who likes, but I was only too ready to stay near Nathalie Haldin, and I am not ashamed to say that it was no smiling matter to me.  I stayed, not as a youth would have stayed, uplifted, as it were poised in the air, but soberly, with my feet on the ground and my mind trying to penetrate her intention.  She had turned to Razumov.

“Well.  This is the place.  Yes, it is here that I meant you to come.  I have been walking every day....  Don’t excuse yourself—­I understand.  I am grateful to you for coming to-day, but all the same I cannot stay now.  It is impossible.  I must hurry off home.  Yes, even with you standing before me, I must run off.  I have been too long away....  You know how it is?”

These last words were addressed to me.  I noticed that Mr. Razumov passed the tip of his tongue over his lips just as a parched, feverish man might do.  He took her hand in its black glove, which closed on his, and held it—­detained it quite visibly to me against a drawing-back movement.

“Thank you once more for—­for understanding me,” she went on warmly.  He interrupted her with a certain effect of roughness.  I didn’t like him speaking to this frank creature so much from under the brim of his hat, as it were.  And he produced a faint, rasping voice quite like a man with a parched throat.

“What is there to thank me for?  Understand you?...  How did I understand you?...  You had better know that I understand nothing.  I was aware that you wanted to see me in this garden.  I could not come before.  I was hindered.  And even to-day, you see...late.”

She still held his hand.

“I can, at any rate, thank you for not dismissing me from your mind as a weak, emotional girl.  No doubt I want sustaining.  I am very ignorant.  But I can be trusted.  Indeed I can!”

“You are ignorant,” he repeated thoughtfully.  He had raised his head, and was looking straight into her face now, while she held his hand.  They stood like this for a long moment.  She released his hand.

“Yes.  You did come late.  It was good of you to come on the chance of me having loitered beyond my time.  I was talking with this good friend here.  I was talking of you.  Yes, Kirylo Sidorovitch, of you.  He was with me when I first heard of your being here in Geneva.  He can tell you what comfort it was to my bewildered spirit to hear that news.  He knew I meant to seek you out.  It was the only object of my accepting the invitation of Peter Ivanovitch....

“Peter Ivanovitch talked to you of me,” he interrupted, in that wavering, hoarse voice which suggested a horribly dry throat.